The Krasker family’s address was recorded as 99 Hay Street, Subiaco on Robert Krasker’s birth registration dated 28 January 1914, noting that he was born in Alexandria, Egypt on 21 August 1913, but the family soon set off for their other address, in Shark Bay.
I’ve yet to search the records in Western Australia to find out if the house currently at 25 Knight Terrace, Denham bears any resemblance to the one in which the Krasker family lived from their arrival in Shark Bay.
Chances are that the current building is of a similar type to the one that stood there in 1910 given many towns in Western Australia still contain houses like this.
I visited some in the past and, whether built from corrugated iron, asbestos, weatherboard or brick, they are uninsulated, uncooled and unheated, and they’re a challenge to live in.
When growing up in towns such as Denham, residents of houses like the Kraskers’ would sleep on camp beds in the front verandah in summer and retreat indoors to bedrooms warmed with kerosene heaters in the winter.
The houses I grew up in there lacked insulation, cooling or heating and the first time I experienced any of these necessities was when I arrived in London and stayed at a hotel in South Kensington.
I was amazed at the gas fireplace with its ceramic logs of “wood” in the well-lit drawing room and the central heating throughout the hotel, having only experienced single-bar electric and “kero” heaters or, as a child, if needing to stay warm and read, curling up under a thin woollen blanket to study under the dim yellow light of a 15-watt clear glass bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.
Monkey Mia and Herald Bight, Shark Bay
I’ve been to Shark Bay just once, while renting a room in the Perth house of a family who ran the caravan park in Monkey Mia in the 1970s.
That house was uninsulated, unheated and uncooled in the customary Australian manner but the caravan park’s accomodations were a revelation.
We drove up there during a university holiday to find an ablutions building made of cast-cement breeze blocks, its showers and hand-basins supplied with seawater from a tank on the asbestos roof and large bottles of what management referred to as “screw juice” made of detergent strong enough to lather up in the salty water coming out of the pipes.
The family’s caravan was also their office and instead of running potable water they relied on a refrigerator packed with 750ml bottles of “VB” aka Victoria Bitter.
It didn’t take much for inexperienced drinkers to respond in the customary manner, dashing off to throw up far enough away from the tents in which we slept on the dunes.
Judging by the aerial shots of Monkey Mia now, quite a bit has changed and nobody I’ve asked and who has lived in the town in recent years recalls the family, the “screw juice” and the saltwater caravan park.
I spent some happy days during that odd vacation paddling in a canoe around the shallow waters, listening for the splash of stingrays while watching for dolphins leaping out of the water closer to the horizon.
Monkey Mia was one of two locations in Shark Bay where Leon Krasker travelled from Denham to buy pearls and pearl shell from the lugger captains who drew up on the beaches, with the other being Herald Bight.
Links
- Shark Bay: World Heritage – Discover Shark Bay
The Robert Krasker Project 